


hoʻokoʻikoʻi pua ahi ʻole

by Siria



Category: Hawaii Five-0 (2010)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Community: h50_flashfic, Harlequin, M/M, alternate universe - harlequin
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-09-13
Updated: 2011-09-13
Packaged: 2017-10-23 17:02:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 19,101
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/252689
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Siria/pseuds/Siria
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>Q: Is he a surfing slacker or decorated navy SEAL?</i><br/>A: Try both.</p><p> </p><p>What is it about extreme surfer Steve "Smooth Dog" McGarrett? Ambitious documentarian Danny Williams has filmed risk-taking sports enthusiasts before, but he's never made a private tape of one of these bad boys…. And it turns out the daring, hot movie version's got nothing on the real thing!</p><p>But Danny's X-treme documentary is turning into an X-asperating docudrama, since McGarrett won't sign the release form. No paper from McGarrett, no big break for Danny. McGarrett wants to help the fiery little number behind the lens, but he can't because his secret life as a navy SEAL has him deep undercover. Yet as Danny stumbles into the line of fire, all bets are quickly off. Steve's risking everything to save Danny. But will it be enough?</p>
            </blockquote>





	hoʻokoʻikoʻi pua ahi ʻole

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the h50_flashfic Harlequin challenge. For this challenge, I felt like I should take inspiration from an actual Harlequin novel—since it turns out there's an entire subgenre devoted to Navy SEALs—so the plot is based on the summary of [this novel](http://www.amazon.com/Risking-Harlequin-Blaze-Stephanie-Tyler/dp/0373793316). The summary I'm using here on AO3 is also a name/pronoun swapped version of the original one; I couldn't pass up the opportunity to describe Danny as a fiery little number.
> 
> Thanks to dogeared and sheafrotherdon for betaing and cheerleading!

Danny liked to consider himself a professional. He was conscientious about his craft, liked to make sure all Is were dotted and Ts crossed; paid attention to his personal grooming, was well-mannered to his clients. He liked to think he was starting to build up a reputation for that, even; so how he'd ended up here, standing on a beach in Hawaii while sand itched between his toes and he was condescended to by some prick called Carlton Bass, Danny had no idea.

"Ian showed me the work you did for us last season," Bass said. "Really impressive stuff, liked your style." The bland smile on his face, the way the words rolled glibly off his tongue, meant that Bass had probably never so much as glanced at the publicity shorts that Danny filmed for Coral Prince.

“Glad to hear it,” Danny said, watching as an assistant came out and handed a manila folder to Bass. He took it without even glancing the assistant’s way to acknowledge her presence. From the resigned look on the woman’s face, that was pretty much business as usual. “I was pretty proud of that centrepiece video myself, the one I did in black and white.”

“Yes, it really had a great noir sensibility to it,” Bass said, looking very earnest, “Very fresh.”

And it might have, if Danny had ever filmed something like that. Maybe it was a dumb move to needle a potentially very important client, but it was good to have confirmation that not only was Bass one of those charmless jerks who operated under the illusion that he was Rico Suave or something, but that he wasn't all that involved in the daily running of the company. If a low-budget marketing campaign like the one Danny had launched on YouTube had managed to pull in half a million hits and a lot of extra internet chatter about _his_ business, Danny would sure as hell have watched some of the shorts, got a feel for how someone was directing the company's public image using little more than a handheld camera and a copy of Final Cut Pro. Looked like it was beneath this schmuck.

None of which Danny could say out loud, of course, not if he wanted to keep this job—and he really did need the money; another couple of months living pay cheque to pay cheque and he was going to have to start giving some serious thought to being a wedding videographer, which, why not just shoot him in the head and get it over with—so he settled for smiling politely, saying "Thank you very much", and accepting Bass' overly aggressive handshake without a murmur.

"Ian sends his apologies that he can't be here to show you around, of course," Bass continued. "But you know how stuff like this goes."

"Sure," Danny said, like he had any kind of intimate knowledge of how to run a multi-million dollar investment conglomerate with an interest in pretty much every industry going on the island.

"Besides, I'm sure you remember our set-up from last season," Bass said. "All the usual faces." He smiled, and Danny knew a dismissal when he got one.

"Sure," he repeated, working on remembering those breathing exercises his kid sister had taught him when she first took up yoga and became wildly concerned at the prospect of him stroking out before he was forty. "No problem."

"Then I'll let you get things arranged," Bass said with a nod. "You'll excuse me. I have a full morning scheduled." He turned on his heel and vanished back into Coral Prince's well-appointed headquarters. Danny made sure that the screen door had closed behind the man before he indulged in an eye roll.

Danny hadn't really brought a set-up with him today—no real point in lugging all that equipment with him if he didn't know when he'd get to shoot, or even what he'd want to focus on—but he wasn't going to take the time to point that out to Bass. The messenger bag slung over his shoulders carried the stuff he'd need for scouting—pencil and notebook, digital camera to record possible vantage points, a map of Honolulu and its suburbs, a bundle of Coral Prince promo material. He had a lot riding on impressing Ian Adams with his work, on convincing him that the short promos weren't just a fluke, that a former political documentary maker from Jersey could make it as an extreme sports documentary maker in Hawaii. If Danny was going to do this, he was going to do it right from the beginning.

He walked down onto the beach a little ways, down to the waterline where the sand was damp and compacted beneath his feet. There were several surfers out this morning. The waves didn't look especially huge—not that Danny would be trying his luck on any wave of any size, thanks; he didn't count any activity that carried a risk of being eaten by a shark as an actual sport—but that didn't seem to be affecting their enjoyment any. Carried on the crisp air, Danny could hear several whoops of satisfaction, see one woman punch her arms up over her head as she crested the wave, like she was taking some kind of victory lap. He stood there for a while, alternating between watching the surfers and taking note of some of the more scenic spots on the beach. Good places for outdoor interviews—ocean in the background, palm trees, a surfboard propped up behind the interviewee. A little clichéd, maybe, but Danny was trying for solid, here, not Oscar-worthy material. He got caught up in planning enough that it took him a while to realise that someone was calling his name.

"Danny Williams, right?"

He turned to see one of the surfers wading out of the water, bright yellow board tucked under one arm, her hair a salt-water tangle around her beaming face. "Ms Kalakaua," he said as she planted her board upright in the sand. "Nice to see you again."

"Hey, brah, call me Kono," she said, punctuating her words with a friendly punch to his upper arm that was strong enough to bruise. "No need to get all _haole_ formal with me! Ian's got you doing more promo vids?"

Danny shrugged, shoved his hands into the pockets of his cords. "Maybe, but he wants me to put together a full-length doc on the team first—you know, what it's like for you guys to go through a whole championship season. Getting into DVD sales and movie downloads would be a good extra revenue stream."

Kono raised an eyebrow, flicked a glance up at the main house. "He didn't mention anything to me about it."

"I'm just the messenger, babe,” Danny said, raising both eyebrows in a way he hoped was expressive of the _ergo, don’t shoot me_ part. “First I heard about it was two days ago, myself."

Kono grinned at him. "No skin off my nose. Long as you make sure to get my good side on camera, okay?"

"I'll see what I can do," Danny said, repressing a laugh, because he was pretty sure Kono didn't have a bad side—in fact, he strongly suspected that the popularity of his YouTube vids owed less to his talents and more to Kono's sunny smile and habit of wearing bikinis that Danny's mother would tut over and refer to uncharitably as dental floss.

"I knew there was a reason I liked you," Kono said, just as another surfer came out of the water. He was tall and lean and wearing a pair of blue swim trunks that hung perilously low on his hips and left little to the imagination, given that they were wet and plastered to his body—not that Danny's imagination wasn't working overtime anyway. Maybe Danny should go ahead and remove the 'theoretically' part from that whole 'theoretically bisexual' description of himself. He had to blink to refocus on what Kono was saying. "… So he's only been here a couple months. Danny, this is Steve Smith, he's on trial with the team. Steve, this is Danny Williams. He's going to be filming a documentary about Coral Prince."

"Really," Steve said. He'd shaken Danny's hand, but the expression on his face was anything but cordial—no rolling out the metaphorical red carpet here. "You're not from Hawaii."

Danny blinked at him. He hadn't been expecting that little bit of conversational whiplash, but, "No," he said evenly, "I'm from Jersey, originally. Why d'you ask?"

Steve snorted, gesturing at him. "Because no one dresses like that in Hawaii. Might as well hang a sign around your neck saying _haole_."

Danny looked down at his outfit, which was a variation on the same quasi-uniform worn by pretty much every filmmaker who worked out of New York. Black cords, black button-down shirt, his green Converse the only splash of colour. It was practical, everything matched, it was neat—Danny did not get this guy's problem. "What's wrong with how I'm dressed? This is the outfit of a professional."

Kono's nose wrinkled. "There's nothing exactly wrong with it, Danny, but Steve's right—it's not very _kama’aina_."

"Well," Danny said, pushing his glasses back up his nose, "then I suppose it works out okay given that I'm just fine with being mistaken for a _haole_ on account of how I am one."

"Hey now," Kono said, laughing, "Steve's a mainlander too, and he's adapting okay! It's not impossible, brah."

Danny arched a sceptical eyebrow at Steve—standing there with his hands on his hips, toes planted firmly in the sand, tattoos flowing over his skin like water, the guy looked every inch the Hawaiian beach bum. (Albeit the beach bums Danny had run into here so far had had less of an aura of barely tamped down menace—their aura was mostly herbological and illegal.)

"I'm from San Diego," Steve offered.

"Ah yes," Danny said dryly. "Southern Californians, of course, being so renowned for how much they stand on ceremony. Must have been a tough adjustment for you."

That, at least, got him a begrudging huff of a laugh.

***********

Kono took him on quick tour of the Coral Prince headquarters—hangout area, admin offices, gym, PTs’ rooms, a sweet-looking home cinema—and some of the surrounding accommodation buildings. Most of the team members stayed on site, in cookie-cutter apartments that looked like they'd been furnished from IKEA and were differentiated only by a greater or lesser degree of neatness, by the posters taped to the walls and the rag rugs on the floor. It gave Danny flashbacks to his first dorm room back at NYU; he wouldn't have been surprised to see a lava lamp on a windowsill, or a Calc book lying dog-eared on a coffee table. After an hour, Kono left him back at his car with a surprisingly fierce hug and an agreement that he'd come back tomorrow to start the filming process.

The tour had been enough to give Danny a much better sense of Coral Prince's operations than he'd managed to glean last season. Back then, he'd pretty much just shot footage of the team competing, down on the shore in the middle of the crowd's hubbub, and he'd had contact only with Ian, Kono, a couple of the team's other big names. He'd never had the opportunity to see the whole group together, and it was much more like a small village than he'd realised. As he went about the rest of his day—stopped off at Target to stock up on beer and toilet paper; called Gracie to get a blow-by-blow update of her progress on a school assignment on the history of France, no less; returned a couple of library books—he realised that his original idea for a film that would follow the whole sweep of the team would have to be revised. A bird's eye, impressionistic view could have worked if Coral Prince had been a little smaller, but given the number of people involved, Danny realised he was going to have to anchor the documentary on one person, two at the most, with the rest of the crew orbiting around them. He got home, put the beer in the fridge, sighed, and took a bottle out again. Kono had been pretty accommodating toward him so far, enthusiastic about giving him access and always ready to smile for the camera. He just hoped that that wouldn't change when he asked her to let him follow her around with a camera for the next three or four months of her life.

He pulled up in front of the Coral Prince headquarters next morning at what he thought was a stupidly early hour, but apparently none of the team shared Danny's opinion—judging by the numbers, almost all of them must have been out making the most of what even Danny could see were some really great waves. Kono was one of the few who wasn't. Danny spotted her on the pathway leading down to the beach, in animated conversation with a guy whom Danny vaguely recognised as one of the team's PTs, though he couldn't put a name to the face.

Kono greeted him with enthusiasm, hugging him briefly but tightly. Danny felt his arms twitch a little at his sides; not sure if he should respond in kind or not to this continued display of unexpected, strangely welcome affection. "Howzit, Danny?"

"Good, I'm good." He hitched a shoulder, jerked his chin in the direction of the beach. "Ready to get started if you are?"

It took the two of them to lug the basic set up he wanted for today into position—camera, tripod, reflectors and light meter—and Danny was glad that they settled on a shooting location not so far away from the HQ. None of his equipment was what you'd call light, and not for the first time, he wished that he had the resources here that he'd had access to back at his old company—here, he didn't have so much as an eager, over-caffeinated intern to help haul his crap around in return for college credit. He got Kono settled, sitting on a blanket underneath the shade of a palm tree, the Pacific gleaming blue behind her, and quickly ran through the kinds of questions he was likely to ask her while he filmed. He wasn't going to give her the exact questions in advance, though; that always tended to make these things look too stagey. Danny double-checked the settings on the camera while they talked; he was still getting used to it after years of stubbornly clinging to film. He couldn't deny that the whole HD thing was great, and it cut down on processing and editing time by one hell of a lot, but the fiddly little on-screen menus were a nightmare to work through with his goofy thumbs.

By the time he'd gotten everything arranged to his liking, Kono had moved from her spot on the blanket—great, he was going to have to reset the lighting now—and was staring out to sea, an expression on her face that was part amusement, part resignation. "Crazy bastard."

"Who?"

"Steve," Kono said. "He, uh. Likes his trick surfing. That's the big reason Ian offered him the contract, I think—you take risks like that, you're going to pull in a crowd."

Danny turned to see for himself. From this angle, he could see a distant figure going for a tube, the wave breaking and curling over him as he— "Is he doing a _headstand_?"

"Yup," Kono replied. "When he wipes out, it's going to…. Ooh, yeah, that had to hurt."

Danny watched, heart in his mouth, because he hadn't expected to watch someone _die_ his first day on the job, here; but after a few moments, a dark head bobbed back up from beneath the waves. Steve raised his arm, gave a thumbs up, retrieved his board and started paddling back out for a new wave. Danny blinked. "So," he said after a moment, watching as Steve popped back up onto his board, pulling some kind of move Danny didn't know the name for but could bet was nowhere near as effortless as Steve made it look, "when you said 'likes his trick surfing', you meant…"

"Brah's totally _hehena_ ," Kono said. "I like him!"

"Uh huh," Danny said, gaze still caught on the sight of Steve, working his way through the surf with swift, economical movements.

He got some good footage of Kono, more than enough to frame action shots of her throughout the documentary, to give context and heft to the interviews he'd have with her about specific competitions. She had good instincts in front of the camera, too—didn't stare right into the lens, didn't aim for nonchalant and come off as stiff and self-conscious. Danny got her to give a little blurb about where she was from, where she grew up; drew out a couple of facts about her ebullient and surf-crazy family; teased her into giving him an anecdote about a late night beach party on the North Shore. "Though Mom, if you're watching this," Kono finished, deadpan, "this all happened when I was over 21 and Brian Akana was definitely, definitely not involved."

"I get the feeling," Danny said as he packed away his equipment after a couple of hours, "that there's a whole other story there that I'm not going to get out of you."

Kono took a swig from her water bottle. "Oh, I could tell you, but then I'd have to kill you. Plus no way I'm letting you get a taped confession."

"Gee," Danny said, deadpan, "You've got my crime-fighting techniques all figured out."

He stayed for lunch back at the main building, partly because Kono asked him, and partly because he had an appointment with one of the Coral Prince admin people that afternoon to put his signature on the last of the contracts. No point leaving only to come back again. One of the team chefs put together a sandwich for him, a bowl of made-from-scratch soup, a side salad—and this, Danny could get used to, even if he fully intended to ignore the rabbit food. It'd been a while since he'd shared a meal with anyone more than Gracie; even longer since someone had made a meal for him, if you ignored Grace's ill-fated (though stoically, valiantly consumed) attempt at brownies last Father's Day.

He followed Kono over to a table beside the dining room's big window; they were ahead of the lunch rush, most of the other team members still out on the water, so the only person already seated at the table was Steve. The room looked out over the ocean, the picture postcard view—of the white sand beach, the waves, the white-and-red painted marina where Coral Prince, and of course Bass and Adams, kept their boats—framed by palm trees. Danny wasn't normally a fan of said picture postcard views—something about all that perfection made him want to grind his teeth—but even he had to admit that the frown on Steve's face as he stared out of the window was a bit much. It was no Weehawken, but it wasn't, like, Miami levels of bad out there. Danny sat, looked at what was on Steve's plate, raised an eyebrow. Maybe he'd located the source of the foul mood right there.

"What," he said, gesturing with his fork, "is that supposed to be?"

Steve turned the frown on him. "What do you mean, what's it supposed to be?"

"Food, alien life-form, papier-mâché project, what? You gotta help me out there," Danny said, grinning, spreading his hands out a little bit. He wasn't sure if Smith had a setting other than disapproving and kind of cranky, Mr Tall-Dark-and-Board-Up-My-Butt, but for some reason Danny had the impression that needling him to find out one way or the other might be fun.

"It's scrambled tofu," Steve said, and now he looked less cranky and more sort of wary, like he didn't know if Danny was asking a genuine question or if he was being mocked. "And tuna."

That was probably the opposite of an auspicious beginning right there, because what kind of person willingly ate tofu, let alone _scrambled_ ; but Steve was all adamant about the health benefits, and Danny found him getting expansive, teasing in his responses. Steve slowly started to unbend, to give as good as he got—the fine lines around his eyes were caused by amusement now, not by a frown. Kono snickered at the two of them so hard she almost choked on her egg-white omelette, and by the time she pushed away from the table with a nonchalant, "Shoots, brahs," Danny was surprised to find that more than an hour had passed and that he had a half-formed idea for a slight change to the format of his documentary.

"So," he said, sitting back in his chair, folding his arms, "I was thinking."

"Dangerous," Steve said, quirking an eyebrow, the beginnings of a smile actually playing around his mouth.

"Your wit," Danny said, "so original. Anyway. I'd originally planned that this documentary, it should be focused on Kono, but I think I'd like to bring you into it, too. You know," he said, waving a hand, "the new guy, dark horse, extreme sports stuff, likes to brood—"

The face Steve pulled was flat-out hilarious; how someone that photogenic could be that rubber-faced, Danny had no idea. " _Brood_?"

"—Make for a great contrast with Kono Kalakaua, two time ASP World Tour Champion. It'd be like the Odd Couple, only on surfboards, everyone's a lot more naked." He regretted saying that last almost as soon as it was out of his mouth—probably shouldn't be mentally associating Steve and nudity when the guy was sitting right in front of him. "There's a couple of release forms you'd have to sign for it, it puts you in line for some of the royalties and such, but—" Danny hadn't thought it was possible for Steve to get twitchier, but there it was.

"No," Steve said flatly, gathering up his plate and silverware and glass and standing up. That look was back on his face, like he'd just smelled something unsavoury. "Not interested." And then he was gone, just like that, like he hadn't just spent an hour talking to Danny about scrambled tofu and surfboard brands and the relative merits, or lack thereof, of Danny's beloved Yankees.

“Okay,” Danny said to the now-empty room, spreading his arms wide. “I’m just going to file that under weird, if no one has any objections.” No one did.

***********

Of course, what Steve Smith did not know was that Danny'd picked up more than one or two skills during the divorce. Sure, he and Rachel mostly got on fine now, but the process of making legal something which had been obvious for months had been brutal—Shark Week reenacted in a Manhattan office, the two of them glaring at one another across a polished glass table while very expensive lawyers politely, verbally flayed one another. In the end, Rachel's lawyer had been that little bit sharper, that little bit more ruthless, and Danny had learned his lesson from that. If you wanted something, you didn't pull your punches—you went straight for it and didn't take no for an answer.

He put in a few calls to Ian Adams, who was overseas on a business trip, and pleaded his case—maybe Steve was a little camera shy, but there had to be something in his contract about agreeing to do promo work, right? Danny got good news and bad news. Yes, Adams thought it was a good idea to include Steve in the documentary, and there was a piece of boilerplate in the team's trial contract about winners of a competition being required to participate in promotional material relating to said competition, but there was nothing in the contract that could force him to sign a release form for the documentary if he didn't want to; no, Danny couldn't lie to Steve and say that Adams had ordered it, anyway. Still, Danny wasn't going to look a gift horse in the proverbial, and so he obtained a copy of the standard trial contract from Coral Prince's head admin person and waved that in Steve's face the next day—it wasn't _taunting_ , he pointed out when Steve objected, he was just making sure that he'd covered all the possibilities.

"So much drama, babe, seriously," Danny said, setting up the camera on the lanai. "You realise you've been bitching longer than it's ever going to take me to film this? It's just a promo spot."

If Steve kept grinding his teeth like that, he was going to need to get the number of a good oral surgeon. "This is pointless, Williams," he said. "I read my contract—I haven't even made top three in a competition with Coral Prince yet, so you need my release before you can use this footage, and I'm not going to sign anything."

"Oh, it's _Williams_ now, is it?" Danny said, adjusting one of the light reflectors a little to account for the rising morning sun. "We get so formal when we're pissy, don't we? And let's just say that I'm preparing for all eventualities."

Steve frowned at him, but not like he was irritated with something Danny said—more like he was trying to figure something out. "I'm not going to place at the Pipeline, Danny."

"Oh ye of little faith," Danny said. He might not be any kind of an expert when it came to surfing, but he'd seen Steve on a board, had heard Kono speak approvingly of Steve's skills, and anyone who earned the praise of Kono Kalakaua had to know his shit. Steve might not win, but he wouldn't disgrace himself, either. "Now shut up, sit down, put on a shirt, jeez, I'm not shooting for _Playgirl_ here." It was a weak attempt at humour, but it made Steve roll his eyes, broke the tension a little, and Steve tugged on a soft-looking blue t-shirt before sitting down in the chair in front of the camera.

Danny nodded at him, and Steve sat up even straighter, his fingers interlaced loosely in his lap. He looked for all the world like he was about to give a lecture on a national security crisis or something. Danny half-expected him to begin with "My fellow Americans", but instead Steve cleared his throat and said, in a robotic monotone, "The Pipeline Championship, November 5th and 6th. Be here. Aloha.” Danny resisted the urge to hit himself over the head, because the camera loved Steve—Jesus, filming him was like making softcore porn even when he was wearing a shirt—but that was probably the worst line reading Danny had ever heard. He'd seen Keanu Reeves' movies where he'd been more convinced by what was going on onscreen.

"What the hell," Danny said. "Stephen Hawking speaks with a computer and he gives better intonation than that."

Steve's face scrunched up. "I have excellent intonation!"

"You're embarrassing me," Danny said, "but more importantly, you're embarrassing yourself. Come on, once more with feeling."

Danny had to admit, the footage of the ninth take was pretty good—sure, Steve came across as a grumpy asshole, but that was definitely what you'd call intonation right there; and in between takes, when he cracked up at something silly Danny said, or explained some surfing term Danny'd never heard of before (all patience, like he had all the time in the world to explain this; all seriousness, like he wouldn't want to be doing anything else), Danny couldn't stop watching him.

***********

Danny had one Russian Jewish grandmother, one Irish Catholic grandmother, one Sicilian atheist grandfather and one grandfather who was God knew what (having only made Nanna's acquaintance during a fifteen minute knee-trembler in a closet at a party to celebrate the Korean War armistice). In other words, he was genetically predisposed towards meals composed almost entirely of carbohydrates, yelling as a means of expressing affection, and a stubbornness so bloody-minded that even he had to admit it was probably the reason his ancestors had been kicked out of Europe. Stubborn enough, in fact, to be sitting out on the beach the next morning at half past the ass crack of dawn, so early that it was almost _cold_ out on this godforsaken island, waiting for Steve to wade out of the surf.

"You don't know when to walk away, do you?" Steve said, dripping salt water all over him, looking torn between irritation and amusement. It was an expression which involved quite a bit of nostril flaring, so Danny was sort of bereft of an explanation as to why he found it so attractive.

Danny squinted up at him, silhouetted as Steve was by the rising sun. "One of the big reasons why Rach divorced me," he said proudly.

"I'm not signing the paperwork," Steve said. "Just have the documentary focus on Kono, like you planned. It'll be a lot easier for everyone."

"Easy is no fun," Danny pointed out. He held up a paper bag and a styrofoam cup to Steve. "I brought you coffee, malasadas, and some of those cocoa puff things from Lilihas, because of how they are amazing."

"Bribe?" Steve said, even as he accepted the coffee and dug one of the malasadas out of the bag, sitting down on the blanket next to Danny.

"Is it gonna work?" Danny asked.

"Nope," Steve said.

"Then think of it as a peace offering," Danny said, spreading his hands wide, "an entirely aboveboard gesture from me to you, which has absolutely no bearing on our little battle of the wills and is merely an indication of friendship. An overture, if you will."

Steve cocked an eyebrow. "That is a very terrible, wordy lie."

"Shut up," Danny said, "don't hog all the malasadas."

 

***********

Danny spent the next two days on the North Shore, filming Kono as she took part in a small local contest—not big enough to draw most of the Coral Prince team, but it was one of the places where Kono had started out, and she insisted on going back every year. It was part of the job, but Danny also had to admit that two days away from the Coral Prince HQ was sort of welcome right now—it might give him enough time to himself to reflect on whether he wanted to continue to flirt shamelessly with Steve. Not that the man wasn’t hot, but he was also prickly and sort of weird, had given no indication that he was necessarily anything other than straight, and Danny had been through enough romantic mortification for one lifetime. He’d long since resolved to look before leaping in the future.

Danny drove up with Kono and some of her friends in an ancient, battered VW minivan, surfboards strapped to the roof and Danny crammed into the back with his equipment. Kono's friends weren't pro-surfers—at least, they didn't surf for a living, but Danny wasn't clear about exactly what it was they did to earn money. They certainly lived the surfing lifestyle, every last stereotype of it—the van smelled vaguely of pot, and they communicated in a mixture of Pidgin and what sounded like Lady Gaga lyrics. Danny had rarely felt so old.

In what was a surprise to absolutely no one, Kono wiped the floor with all comers, winning the competition by a comfortable margin. Danny caught it all—the sleek line of her back as she paddled out to sea, the angles of her body as she shredded along the cusp of a wave, centre of balance rising and falling in time with the pulse of the ocean—but made time, too, to seek out some of the people in the crowd. He got soundbites from fans, testimonials from other surfers who were visiting from Chile and Japan and the UK, shy confessions from little Hawaiian girls who wanted to grow up to be the next Kono Kalakaua. It'd make for good colour in the documentary, and Danny also had the suspicion that it would raise some colour in Kono's cheeks when he played the footage back for her.

That night, Kono used most of her competition winnings to buy a couple of kegs, and someone got a bonfire going down on the beach. Danny ended up sitting around the fire with the others, camera packed away for the first time in hours, replaced by a notebook and pencil and plastic cup of cheap beer. People were already too tipsy to make a good impression on film—not that it wouldn't make good footage, but Danny knew that neither Adams nor Bass were likely to want to release a DVD which showed their team's star three sheets to the wind—but Danny wasn't above taking advantage of some slightly lowered inhibitions in order to get the good stuff on team members. A little prodding, a little careful direction of the conversation, and he was soon hearing about the infamous prank war that Coral Prince and one of the Australian teams had waged while on tour last year.

"Where the hell did Kono manage to get that many pounds of noodles in the middle of the night?" Danny said, frowning.

"Who knows, man?" Rick said, listing slightly to one side. " _Wahine_ 's got skills. Should've seen their faces. Everyone smelled like soy sauce for days."

No one seemed to have any good stories to tell him about Steve, though, shrugging when Danny pressed for some little anecdote or bit of vaguely scandalous gossip. People liked him, respected that he seemed so _kama'aina_ for all that he was a mainlander, liked that he'd picked up da kine so quickly, but Smith kept to himself. Didn't hang out with anyone outside of practice, didn't say much about his past. No one had ever heard him mention a girlfriend or a boyfriend, or even seen him make out with one of the groupies he picked up.

"He's got a lot of groupies," Keonaona said, helpfully.

"Yes, thank you," Danny said, "that's great to know," and tried not to think about how waspish that bit of information made him feel. This weird sort-of-maybe flirting thing he had going on with Steve was enough to deal with without him feeling like it was totally hopeless. He spent most of the rest of the evening with the notebook closed on his lap, nursing his cup of beer and thinking about calling _Matty_ and asking for dating advice, Jesus, how messed up was that.

They headed back to Honolulu late the next afternoon, Danny clutching a travel mug of coffee and squinting out at the too-bright world from behind his sunglasses. Halfway back, he got a call from Rachel—she and _Stanley_ had to leave for Macau on a sudden, urgent business trip. Could she persuade him to take Grace for the week? As if she had to ask, Gracie was his baby girl, he'd moved halfway around the world just to be able to see her 'not enough' instead of 'hardly ever', but Danny was working on his anger management issues—bit his tongue for a moment before politely saying that he would be fine with that, he'd be happy to take her, he'd be over there in an hour or two. The Coral Prince team was spending the week gearing up for the Pipeline Championship, training in a focused, intensive way that might make Danny more a hindrance than an unobtrusive background feature, so the timing wasn’t actually so bad. During the day, Danny worked on editing the footage he had so far—assembled a basic outline that let him see how things were going to build from here to the end of the surfing season, considered what music might be good to use at various points, sketched out a rough idea for what the credits might look like. In the afternoons, he picked Grace up from school: helped her with her homework, made her dinner, lost himself in the mundane happiness of having his kid under the same roof as him again, even if it was only for a little while.

Thursday afternoon, he gave in to her curiosity about what her dad was doing every day and stopped off for a few minutes with her at the Coral Prince beach on their way from her stupidly tony private school back to his place. There wasn't anyone around for Gracie to talk to—they were all out on the ocean, surfing waves that made Danny's stomach flip just looking at them, made him insist Grace hold his hand because of the silly, irrational, gut-clenching fear that a freak wave might wash in and suck them all off the beach—but she still loved it, watching the surfers' acrobatics, her mouth slack with awe.

"Can I have surfing lessons, Danno?" Grace said, looking up at him with big brown eyes as they walked back to the car. "Please? I'll eat the crusts on my sandwiches if you let me have lessons."

"Ask me again when you're thirty," Danny said, helping her buckle her seat belt. "Also you should eat your crusts anyway, monkey, that's where all the vitamins are."

Saturday was their last day together—no school, no work, Rachel and Stan's flight not due in until six that evening, and they had so much fun, it was ridiculous. How just having ice cream for lunch and raiding the bookstore for new novels could make his heart so goofy, he had no idea, but they spent at least three hours sitting on the floor at Barnes and Noble, Danny trying to persuade Grace away from _Twilight_ and towards some Tamora Pierce. "Look!" he said, holding up an omnibus copy of _Song of the Lioness_ , "it's got princesses and girl knights and magic and so much less chance of you and me needing a two-for-one deal on therapy in ten years' time, huh?"

"Jinny Wei goes to therapy," Grace said, "because her mom caught her dad with a cabana boy. What's a cabana?"

"Uh huh," Danny said weakly. "That's, uh… oh jeez would you look at the time, I think we should get going."

He knew himself well enough to know why his mood dipped so dramatically when he dropped Gracie back at Rachel and Stan's—watched the door close behind her and her bright pink backpack, her much-loved stuffed frog stuck under one arm and a new book bag clutched in one hand. He sighed and drove halfway home, then took a sudden left and headed down to the Coral Prince beach. It was getting dark, so he wasn't really expecting anyone to be there, thought at most he'd just be putting off an empty apartment for a little while longer, but Steve's ridiculously huge black truck was in the parking lot.

Danny got out, walked down along the shore to the spot that usually gave him the best view of the surfers, but there was no sign of anyone out on the waves. For a moment, he thought maybe Steve might have cut back up to the parking lot another way, that they'd just missed one another in the twilight, but then Danny spotted him—quite a bit further down the beach than normal, wet suit pulled down around his waist (and what _was_ this thing with the constant near-nudity? Not that Danny _objected_ , he just… had a curiosity). Danny ambled over toward him, noting that Steve's board was planted in the sand beside him and that Steve hadn't noticed him because he was staring out to sea through a pair of binoculars. Danny peered out at the horizon, but he couldn't tell what Steve was looking at. The only thing blurring the line between darkening sea and sky were the distant lights of what was maybe a big tanker ship.

"Hey," Danny said when he got closer.

Steve started a bit, binoculars jerking away from his face. His expression wavered in a way that would have been funny if it wasn't so weird—an instant, bright smile giving way to a sharp frown before he smiled again, though this expression was a lot less bright and a lot more plastered on. "Danny," he said, "what are you doing here?"

"Happy Saturday to you, too," Danny said, arching an eyebrow. "I was just on my way home, thought I might see if you were here." He dug a piece of paper out of his pants—now creased and stained after several days living in his pocket and an unfortunate encounter with a cup of coffee. "And whoops, what's this, I just happen to have with me this release form right here, this agreement that you might want to sign." He flapped the paper in Steve's direction.

Steve rolled his eyes before huffing out a sigh, rubbing at the back of his neck, saying, "Why the hell is this so important to you, huh?"

Danny fought down the urge to bristle at that; realised that Steve's question was genuine, not a snide brush off. "I like my job, okay?" he said. "I love my job, I want to do it well. The owners, they hired me to make a documentary about their team, and if I just make it a bio of Kono like they expect, then it's only going to be _half_ the story of _part_ of their team. Kono's great, and you know she'd kick my ass if I thought anything else, but there's the people who are at the top and the people who are trying to get there, and I think both those stories are worth the telling, okay? I want to do this job right… and this island is fucking expensive, okay, costs a lot more to live here than to live back home, so I need this to get my name out there or I'll end up back in Jersey, living in my parents' basement and filming bar mitzvahs."

Steve frowned at him. "If Jersey's home, why don't you want to go back there?"

"My daughter's here," Danny said, slashing one hand out to the side in a definitive gesture. "If she's here, I'm not going to be anywhere else."

"Oh." Steve blinked at him. "And your ex is—"

" _Ex_ wife," Danny emphasised. No way he wasn't going to cut off that potential misunderstanding at the pass, because much as he might have entertained the fantasy once, there was no chance of him and Rach ever getting back together. "Divorced two years ago, able to talk to one another again for the past eighteen months. Rachel's remarried, she and her husband got promoted to head up the Pacific division of the Marham Hotel Group. So here they are and here I am." He spread his arms wide, as if to say: _here I stand; I can do no other_. As your standard-issue ethical, theological, moral statement of purpose, Danny was sure it was probably lacking in originality, but what the hell. Family was family; his daughter was his daughter. Danny had drawn his lines in the sand long ago.

Steve cleared his throat, looked down at his feet, looked up at the sky, took a step closer to Danny. No question about it, the guy was a fucking giant—Danny rarely felt self-conscious about his height, but he hated having to do stuff like this, tilt his head back so he could look Steve in the eye, especially when they were so close that Danny could practically feel the heat radiating off Steve's bare chest. "You're pushing me this hard because you want to stay here with your daughter?" Steve said quietly.

Danny scrunched up his nose. "It's not like I'm a fan of running up and down a beach getting more sand in my shoes than absolutely necessary, babe."

"If you didn't dress like a tourist—"

"I _am_ a tourist!" Danny yelled because Christ on a pogo stick, this was round forty-seven of the same goddamned debate and he'd wear flip flops on the job when he was _dead_ and no sooner, but before he could get up a good head of steam, Steve interrupted him.

"But you're here because this is home for your daughter."

Danny felt himself deflate all of a sudden; felt, in a shocking rush, a fierce burst of exhaustion. "Yeah," he said, folding his arms, not knowing why he felt so weirdly defensive for no real reason. "Yeah, I am."

"I'll." Steve cleared his throat. "I'll consider it, okay? I'm not going to make any promises, but I'll consider it."

"That's—thank you," Danny said, startled enough that he couldn't think of anything more to say.

After that, Danny felt awkward—felt that he should leave, that one of them or the other had overstepped some boundary line, though Danny wasn't quite sure where that line was anymore. But Steve said "Hey, I've got a six pack of Longboards in my room" and "You want one?", and Danny's apartment would still be sad and dark and lonely when he got back there. They ended up sitting on the lanai back at the main Coral Prince house, watching the moonlight shatter silver against the roar of the surf, teasing and talking nonsense and Danny trying not to let his pulse pick up too much at the way he caught Steve looking at him sometimes—like he was happy; like he didn't want to look away.

***********

As well as working on the documentary, Danny's contract with Coral Prince also promised him a little extra money for working on the team's social networking infrastructure. He wasn't one of those guys who called themselves 'new media experts', whatever the hell that meant, who could spit out buzz words like 'synergy' and 'leveraging' at a moments notice, but Danny knew a little something about getting the word out. It was the kind of skill he'd picked up, back in the days when he'd been so caught up in his job, so high on the thoughts of the good to be done, the wrongs to be righted out there in the world that he hadn't really noticed he was spending less and less time at home, not until it was too late.

He set up a Twitter account for the team, updated the info on their Facebook page, made sure all the links on the team's website were functional. Bass had obviously hired someone to cobble together a website back in 2005 and neglected it since then; half the links led to a 404 page, the coding made Danny think of a Geocities page circa 1997, and a full third of the team members on the bio pages were people Danny had never even seen, long since moved on from Coral Prince thanks to injury or retirement. Monday morning, Danny sat down with a full cup of coffee and set himself to the task of updating the whole thing in one fell swoop. He deleted John Moreira and Mariam Levi, transferred the list of Kono's recent victories from a scribbled page in his notebook to her bio page, added new pages for Keonaona Iaukea and Steve Smith, amongst others. Keonaona's page was pretty easy—she already had a blog, a Twitter, a Tumblr, accounts on sites Danny'd never even heard of—so getting her info right was just a matter of synthesising what he had to work with.

Steve, of course, was a different story—nothing could be easy when it came to him, it seemed. Danny used every search tool he could think of, put together every search word combo his imagination could muster, even called up his little sister and cajoled her into giving him her passwords so he could access the online databases her university had access to. No matter how or where he searched, though, he only and ever came up with the same five facts about Steve online: Steve Smith was from San Diego. He was 6"1. His likes included cheese and Sherlock Holmes novels. His dislikes included basketball. The man had a Facebook fan page about his _abs_ , for crying out loud, but no interviewer, no intrepid fan, had ever been able to find out more about Steve than that. He might as well have just said he liked pina coladas and taking walks in the rain, it was that bland and non-specific. It was weird but hey—Danny's job for years had been to do some digging, find out the shitty things that politicians had done, the embarrassing skeletons—whether proverbial or real—in the closets of major multinational corporations. There was bound to be something else he could find out about the guy—someone who surfed as well as Steve, he was sure to have been surfing for years, even if not on the pro-circuit. He maybe competed for his high school, which raised the possibility of finding some truly hilarious early-90s photos of Steve Smith, Teenage Surfer.

Most yearbooks from that era hadn't been digitised yet, but Danny got in touch with a researcher contact of his on the West Coast, called in a favour and got him to trawl the yearbooks of all high schools in San Diego and the surrounding counties for a Steve Smith over a roughly ten year span, just to be sure. Dave got back to him in a couple of days, having turned up exactly one Steven Smith who was roughly the right age and had attended a high school in San Diego. The guy had even done a little surfing for Point Loma High School—it all looked a fairly reasonable match, except for how when Dave scanned in the relevant yearbook pages and emailed them over to Danny, Steve Smith of the Class of '94 turned out to be a black guy with a 'fro who'd probably have to stand on tiptoes to be taller than _Danny_.

Danny sat and looked at the photo of Steve-who-was-not-Steve for a long time. His Spidey Sense got to tingling.

***********

Over the next couple of days, Danny made excuses to spend a lot of time filming down on the shore. He said that he wanted to experiment with some new camera angles, and that was partially true—the new camera he'd ordered, the waterproof digital one that he'd had to take out a small business loan to afford, had finally arrived, and he wanted to see what it could do. But even more than that, Danny wanted a chance to observe Steve, to figure out if any of his suspicions—the good, the bad—had anything to back them up. In terms of surfing ability, Danny probably ranked somewhere between a water-phobic cat and a particularly slow sheep, but he could still paddle out on a board. He took to spending time out on the water, down low on his belly while the others shot past him on their boards. He got some amazing shots of the strain in Steve’s arms as he pushed out to meet the wave; of Kono pulling a manoeuvre that had Danny's eyebrows rising up towards his hairline, as she turned off the lip of a wave, lying back so that she was cushioned for a moment in the white water foam before snapping back up to stand tall on her board once more. When she raced in past Danny, she was laughing, and he hoped like crazy he'd caught the sound of it, bright like the sun was when it was refracted through all that clear Hawaiian water.

He even, once or twice, deigned to actually get fully into the water, borrowing a wetsuit from one of the Coral Prince managers and planning to dive down to see if he could get decent shots from below. He had an image in his head of seeing the sleek shapes of the surfboards gliding through the water above him, dark silhouettes that would make the perfect backdrop for the documentary's credits.

Steve made a face when he saw Danny walk out wearing the suit, though with the way his eyes flickered over the black neoprene, Danny wasn't sure if that was because of some generalised aversion to a swimming outfit made from something more substantial than dental floss, or if it was something to do with Danny in particular. "I thought you couldn't swim," Steve said. Danny could never figure out which muscle group you had to use to make your eyebrows move like that.

"Hey," Danny said, holding up both hands, "I grew up on the Jersey Shore, pretty much, I know how to swim! I just choose to use said skills _selectively_ , because unlike some people I could mention, I don’t feel the need to, you know…” He flapped a hand in Steve’s general direction and hoped like hell that Steve didn’t ask him to clarify, because that was bound to result in Danny blurting out something about licking Steve’s stomach, and that would just be embarrassing for all concerned.

"You're a strange man, Danny Williams," Steve said, but he still offered to swim out for a bit with Danny, to show him where the best places would be underwater to get footage of the surfers as they came in—where the traffic overhead would be steady, but where it wasn't too shallow and there was less risk of a riptide. Now, Danny was willing to admit that sometimes he could have a bit of an ego—he was no narcissist, thank you very much, but he could accept he was good at his job, that he could concoct a mean marinara sauce, that his ability to waltz had moved more than one grandma to tears—but he didn't think his ego was tricking him into exaggerating just how much surreptitious touching Steve worked into 'showing Danny the ropes.' No wishful thinking was necessary to come to the conclusion that Steve was touching Danny a whole hell of a lot more than was required—a brush of his fingertips against Danny's shoulder before they dived, his hand glancing against Danny's hip to get his attention, one foot nudging against Danny's as they swam back up. All of which was maybe giving Danny one particular answer—no need to pass Steve a note any time soon saying _do you like like me, tick yes or no_—but there was still no getting away from the nagging suspicion that something else wasn't quite right with Steve.

By the time they swam back to shore and Danny had showered the salt and sand from his hair, it was about time for dinner. Danny thought maybe he had the fixings of a sandwich back at his rathole of an apartment, but Steve made him stay—led him back to own quarters and picked up another six pack of beer, some steaks, and a small portable grill before they headed back down to the beach. Some little part of Danny—okay some huge part of Danny, the moral majority, whatever—was turning internal somersaults at the fact that this seemed an awful lot like a date; because Steve had shrugged into a tight black t-shirt and a pair of loose board shorts and because he was grinning at Danny with a smile that made Danny want to do filthy things to him. But there was still that other part of him—the rat bastard part, Danny thought; or, to be just that little bit more charitable to it, the part that had been an investigative documentarian for a decade, the part that had dispassionately observed how his marriage had faltered and seen the faults on both sides—that was saying _whoa, wait, slow down; we've been through this before. Patience, grasshopper_.

So they ate, and they drank, and Danny dug with a different agenda than he’d ever had before—subtly, of course, because Danny could do subtle, whatever Rachel might say, he had skills. They talked about surfing, about Gracie, had a healthy debate about whether it would be cooler to be sucked into the _Star Wars_ or _Star Trek_ universes.

"Spock," Danny said, playing his trump card, pointing his beer bottle at Steve to underscore his point.

Steve just shook his head in exaggerated sadness. "Han Solo. His best friend was a Wookie, _and_ he shot first."

"Your priorities are strange and I disapprove of them," Danny said.

Steve talked, and he smiled, his eyes crinkling up at the corners with the force of his grin, but for the first time Danny really paid attention to the ways in which Steve stonewalled, in which he gave answers that weren't really answers. Nothing about his childhood, his family; when Danny asked if Steve had siblings, Steve's answer meandered its way back into a question about Danny's. The few anecdotes that Steve shared about his past all seemed to happen in a kind of limbo—"friends" were involved but they never had names, events occurred but in a nameless vacuum, their locations undescribed. And okay, maybe Steve was a late transfer student to San Diego, or left the city after middle school, or maybe he boycotted his high school yearbook or something, but Steve's opaque past and the way he subtly deflected questioning, the way he knew surf lingo and shredded like a champ but was the least brah-like brah Danny had come across in his (admittedly limited) experience—seriously, stick of titanium up his butt for real—cast a whole new light on why Steve so steadfastly refused to participate in the Coral Prince documentary. Danny was suspicious, was what.

***********

On Thursday evening, Kono declared that she was throwing a blow-out, no-holds-barred party at her place on Saturday night to celebrate someone new joining the team—Austin something, Danny hadn't caught the full name, but he was apparently pretty well-known on the Aussie surfing scene. Kono didn't describe her party like that of course—said something about a small get-together, just a few people, maybe a couple of drinks—but the twinkle in her eye when she invited Danny to come along told him otherwise. He wasn't at all surprised when he pulled up outside of Kono's low, ranch-style house that weekend to find something in progress that looked like the last days of Babylon. There was music, loud and rhythmic; a crowd of people was out dancing on the lanai, a mix of surfers still wearing their swim gear and others in jeans and shorts and dresses; everyone held at least one plastic cup holding something sticky and alcoholic-looking. Someone was running around the tiny garden dressed up as a giant chicken; a small crowd had gathered around someone else who was doing a kegstand, cheering them on. Danny sidled his way in through the door, thinking he'd find Kono, say hi, hang around for just enough to not seem like an asshole, and then head home. Danny'd definitely been to parties wilder than this when he was at college—hell, he'd maybe even thrown a couple that could probably have gotten him expelled if the university had ever found out about it—but that had been almost fifteen years, one whole marriage and a mortgage on a townhouse in Weehawken ago. Now, watching people drink that much vodka neat made him feel tired.

He didn't see Kono right away as he moved through the living room, but she evidently found him—he heard a cry of "Daniel Williams!" and then he was wrapped up in what felt an awful lot like a bear hug. Kono was deceptively skinny—she was all sinew and muscle, and when she squeezed him a little, Danny felt all the breath leave him in an _oof_. Kono was also pleasantly tipsy, if the way her eyes were shining was any indication. "Danny!" she crowed. "You came!"

"I did," Danny agreed, carefully peeling her off him. "And I didn't even have to bring a watermelon."

"Danny," Kono said, "Danny, you should meet my cousin Chin Ho." She grabbed him by the wrist, steered him through the throng and into a small sunroom off the living room that seemed a little less crowded than just about everywhere else. Two people were sitting on a white-painted wickerwork sofa in there, both of them in business suits, nursing drinks and looking rather obviously out of place. The man at least looked rather nonchalant about it; point of fact, he looked like a GQ model, in a well-tailored grey suit and a crisp white shirt, the top few buttons of which were opened. Danny could just about see the end of his tie poking out of his pants' pocket. If Danny tried that, he'd look like a waiter on his break; on this guy, it just looked sort of effortless James Bond cool. "This is Chin! He's in the _CIA_ ," Kono said in what she obviously thought was a stage whisper.

"Nice to meet you," Danny said, shaking Chin's hand. Chin's grip was firm and cool. "I'm Danny Williams. I'm working on a documentary about Coral Prince."

Chin's eyes crinkled up pleasantly when he smiled. "Chin Ho Kelly, nice to meet you too. Kono's told me a lot about you."

"Oh boy," Danny said.

"And this is Chin's partner—work partner, I mean," Kono said. "Not partner partner, because Chin's married to Malia, she's a doctor and also she'd kick his _ass_ if he did anything. But I think she's cute! Not Malia, I mean, that'd be weird."

"Okay," Danny said, "no more vodka for _you_ ," while Chin's partner turned bright pink and fumbled her drink so that most of it spilled into the potted plant sitting next to her on a low table.

"I—" the woman said. "That is, uh…" She pushed her glasses back up her nose, looking as if she'd gladly let the ground open up and swallow her right there and then, but she didn't seem to object too much when Kono dragged her up onto the dance floor. Danny swiped a beer from a nearby cooler and took the newly vacated seat next to Chin.

"So," Danny said, surveying the goings on. You had to admit, it took a lot of chutzpah to light up a joint in the presence of not one, but two, CIA officers. But whatever, these were surfers; they probably never had the fear gene to begin with.

"Yup," Chin said, in tones that could only be perfected by the long-suffering, and sipped at his drink.

It felt as if Chin were one of the few grown-ups Danny'd hung around with since he'd moved to Hawaii—he was easygoing, had a relaxed sense of humour, understood the particular kind of pleasure that could only be had from watching a well-played game of baseball, didn't spend hours extolling the virtues of pineapple. Danny figured that had to be at least in part because of the years Chin had apparently spent living outside of the state—Kono's state of inebriation hadn't made her untruthful, and Chin Ho was indeed a CIA agent, working out of DC while his wife was a doctor at Walter Reed.

"Take it you're not back here on a family vacation," Danny said, nodding in the direction of Chin's partner—Jenna Kaye, he'd been told—who'd lost her suit jacket somewhere and was dancing with Kono in a way which confirmed Danny's long-held suspicion that it was _always_ the quiet ones. Chin didn't seem like the kind of guy who'd play around behind his wife's back with a work colleague, and the probability was low that someone who was trying to enjoy a dirty weekend away would do so while a) wearing a _suit_ and b) attending a party thrown by a family member who would no doubt report their presence, and their choice of company, to all and sundry.

Chin shook his head. "No, brah. Following up a lead on a case Jenna and I've been working for a while. Bumped into Kono this morning downtown, she invited us along tonight and wouldn't take no for an answer."

"Family, eh?" Danny said with a grin.

"Yeah," Chin said, and for a moment the lines around his mouth tightened, his smile grew brittle, in a way that let Danny know that he must have unintentionally trod on a nerve.

Danny cast around for something to say that was less awkward than the time Mrs Silverstein had caught him with a BLT two weeks before his bar mitzvah, resettled his glasses on his nose, but before he could open his mouth, he saw Chin's expression shift—the echo of some old pain was gone, replaced by a faint kind of bemusement. Danny followed his gaze across the living room, saw Steve standing in the doorway of Kono's tiny kitchen, chatting easily with someone. It didn’t look like he’d noticed Danny was there. Steve was dressed up more than Danny had ever seen him—not that that meant much given that his normal outfit consisted of a pair of swim trunks, maybe a tank top—but he was wearing a slim-fitting pair of jeans, a deep green t-shirt that clung to his biceps and made Danny think terrible, terrible things. Danny watched as Steve retrieved a bottle opener from a side cabinet and vanished back into the kitchen. "Everything okay?" Danny said.

"Nothing," Chin said, leaning back in his seat and taking another sip of his drink. "Just could have sworn that guy reminded me of someone—my old partner's kid, back when I was a rookie in HPD. Haven't seen him in… man, has to be well over ten years now."

"Who," Danny said cautiously, feeling a terrible premonition, like he was on the verge of finding out something huge here. "Smith?"

Chin shrugged. "Huh, no, must not be him after all. This guy's name was McGarrett. Steve McGarrett."

 

***********

For ever after, Danny was going to be able to use that evening as proof of the fact that he was indeed capable of patience. He sat on his hands for a whole fifteen minutes before making his excuses to Chin; saluting Kono, who was probably guilty of encouraging a CIA agent to engage in conduct unbecoming in her coat closet; and hurrying out to his car. He pulled out his phone, battling his goofy thumbs and a sudden attack of nerves as he entered various combinations into a search engine: Steve, Steven, Stephen, McGarrett, MacGarrett. It took him a few false starts, but eventually he came up with one reference to a Steven J. McGarrett in an obituary in the _Honolulu Advertiser_ , dated three years before—son of Detective John C. McGarrett, late of the Honolulu Police Department, passed suddenly of a heart attack at his residence. Family service, donations in lieu of flowers to the Honolulu Police Relief Association. The obituary was fairly sizable, and Danny got the distinct impression that John McGarrett had been a pretty visible figure in the local community, but there was no mention of his son in it beyond his name—not where he lived, not what he did for a living. The only other family listed was 'a daughter, Mary'; John McGarrett was pre-deceased by his wife, Carolyn, and his sister, Judith.

Danny scrubbed at his face with his hands, then carefully set his phone down on the passenger seat and drove home. He made a pot of coffee, poured himself the largest mug he could find, then sat down at the rickety card table that served as his desk, opened up his laptop, and started to search. He found quite a few Steven J. McGarretts in the US, but none of them seemed a match for the Steve he'd come to know—there was an accountant in Seattle, a structural engineer in Des Moines, even an organic beekeeper in some podunk town in southern Georgia. None of them, however, seemed like the kind of person to up and join a championship surfing team under an assumed name. Mary McGarretts, there were so many of them that Danny didn't know where to start looking; he didn't know if she was younger than her brother or much older, which made it harder to use her to find out more about Steven J.

Though hell if Danny could imagine the kind of person who _would_ join a surfing team under an assumed name. Did Steve's family have some sort of crazed lifelong vendetta against the sport, make him swear that he'd never surf so long as he lived, but he couldn't resist the chance to swallow a couple gallons of salt water daily, had to do it even if it was under a false name? Was it a Mob thing, a WitSec thing, some kind of weird undercover performance art thing? Fucked if Danny knew. He rubbed at his forehead; between the alcohol, the coffee, the late night, the confusion, he could feel a monster headache brewing. He'd just been hired to film some pretty people mess with the laws of physics in improbable ways while balanced on tiny bits of fibreglass. What the hell was he doing here?

He didn't sleep much that night, arrived down at the Coral Prince HQ the next morning to find most people shuffling around and looking like they shared his pain. Several people were sitting on the lanai, sunglasses on even though it was pretty cloudy out, each one clutching a large mug of steaming coffee. "Hey," Danny said.

Keonaona just groaned at him in response; Mark poured himself some more coffee and said, "Brah, Kono ever give you da purple kine, you say no."

"I will bear that in mind," Danny said, wrinkling his nose. Clearly none of them had showered or been out into the ocean yet—they all smelled of something sickly sweet mingled with old sweat. "Any of you seen Steve around?"

"Think Smithy took his coffee down onto the beach," Keonaona said.

 _Smithy_ , Danny mouthed to himself in disbelief, because he had been unaware he was at an Ivy League college in the Twenties, but he thanked them and headed out over the dunes. He was pretty sure he passed two other members of the team passed out in the sand, snoring with all the abandon of the inebriated; Kono Kalakaua's drink mixing skills must be mighty indeed. Steve, when Danny found him, didn't seem to have been much affected by it though. He had both hands wrapped around a large white coffee mug, and he was staring fixedly out at the horizon like he wasn't really aware of what was going on around him, but he didn't look as if he'd been awake all night either.

For a moment, Danny hesitated, because maybe he'd got this all wrong. This Steve might just look like the Steve Chin had once known—'Steve' wasn't exactly a Jingleheimer-Schmidt level unusual name; he was good looking but not freakishly distinctive—and besides, there was no real appropriate way to slip, "So, are you some kind of imposter or scam artist or something?" into a conversation. Even Miss Manners probably didn't have a guide to this one, and God only knew what Danny would do if he was wrong, if Steve blinked at him and decided Danny was some kind of nut. But there was no way Danny could help it. Give him a mystery, give him some problem to solve and he was like a dog with a bone—Rachel could testify to his stubbornness, his marrow-deep unwillingness to give in, and so he sat down in the sand next to Steve, tried to think of a good way to bring up the topic.

"So a birdie tells me you had an interesting night," Danny said as Steve turned towards him. "The kitchen must have been the happening place at that party. _Smithy_."

Steve grinned, ducked his head, took another sip of his coffee, and oh, Danny was so screwed if the sight of Steve's stupidly long eyelashes against his cheekbones could do _that_ to Danny's stomach. "Didn’t know you were there, man," Steve said. "And no, not really. Stuck to beer, got trapped talking about home equity loans with some realtor cousin of Kono’s. Didn't have any of the purple stuff. Escaped after an hour or so.”

"Ah," Danny said sagely. "So you _do_ have a sense of self-preservation, I was starting to wonder."

Steve laughed—a full-on, belly-deep laugh that sounded as if it had been startled out of him. It sounded as if he'd startled _himself_ with his own laughter, and Danny realised he didn't think he'd ever heard Steve laugh that loudly, found himself grinning back helplessly. Steve set his now-empty coffee mug down beside him, looked over at Danny and said, "So what are you doing here this early?"

"Well," Danny said, "I thought… I mean…" and really, now was the time for Danny's much vaunted flow of words to dry up? Now was the time he couldn't find words to express himself—him, Danny Williams, who'd been the scourge of his mother since he was two years old and learned the word "why?", who'd traumatised TAs the length and breadth of his undergrad career with papers that inevitably went five pages over the limit.

"Danny," Steve said, and Danny focused—saw that Steve's expression had changed; that he looked completely serious, like he was staring down the barrel of a gun or something, and then Steve was leaning in towards him.

 _Holy shit_ , Danny thought to himself. This close, Steve's eyes were blue green, his jawline sharp with morning stubble; Danny was going to kiss him, was going to make out on a beach with a guy he'd only known for a couple of weeks, a guy whose name he wasn't even sure he knew. But _fuck it_ , he thought with a ferocity that almost surprised even him, _seriously, fuck it_ ; there was every chance he was going to work his way through a couple of baseball-based metaphors with this guy on a beach, in public, with sand _everywhere_ and he couldn't bring himself to object. He felt Steve's fingertips brush over the back of his hand, a tentative touch that left an electric wake behind it; felt Steve's mouth brush against his, hot and a little chapped and just, seriously, it was greatness even before Danny's slowpoke brain caught up with the fact that every nerve in his body was lighting up, screaming _jackpot, jackpot_ in neon letters. He heard himself grunt in the back of his throat, tried to lean in a little more, chasing the sensation of Steve’s tongue in his mouth—and then almost fell over when Steve pulled back suddenly.

"Okay!" Steve said, scrambling to his feet, all wide-eyed and weirdly uncoordinated, like a startled giraffe, "I have stuff to do! Over there!”

Danny blinked, because there had been kissing but now there was none, and there were only so many whiplash moments he could process in the space of one five-minute period. "What the _actual_ fuck?"

But Steve was already gone, quick-marching back towards the Coral Prince building with his back strangely stiff and his hands clenched in fists at his side. He didn't look back once. Danny thought of every single swear word, curse, and piece of invective he'd picked up from his grandparents, flopped back down on his back in the sand, and unleashed them all at the listening Hawaiian sky.

***********

After the morning which Danny came to think of as the Morning of Mixed Signals to End All Mixed Signals, he made an executive decision to spend the rest of the day at home. He had Grace anyway, since Rachel and Stan were going to an evening wedding, one of those frou-frou ones where the least expensive thing the couple had registered for was a $175 creamer and children were strictly frowned upon. The two of them made chocolate chip pecan cookies, after solemnly pinky-swearing that no one would tell Rachel that said cookies made up at least half of their food intake for the day, and then he let Grace watch some of the footage he'd already transferred onto his editing desktop. She had questions about everything and everyone, and Danny was surprised at how much surfing slang he'd picked up over the past few weeks—he mightn't be able to understand what the hell was going on in his life, but hey, at least he could understand some of the descriptions team members gave of their favourite surfing moves.

Still, there was an awful lot he couldn't decipher, and so about three he called Kono, bribed her into coming over and helping him transcribe and annotate footage in return for some fresh-baked cookies. "I'll even throw in the milk for free," he said, "this is a once-in-a-lifetime offer, here."

"You'd make a terrible used car salesman, brah," Kono said, but she came over anyway, looking no worse the wear for last night, beaming sunnily at Danny and greeting Grace with as much affection as if she were her own little cousin.

"Oh, to have the metabolism of the young," Danny said as he shut his apartment door.

"If you exercise while you drink, no next day hangover," Kono said. For a moment, Danny was a little confused, but then Kono winked at him and said, "Coat closet."

Danny rolled his eyes and said, "I'm pretty sure debauching a CIA agent is a federal offence."

"Pfft," Kono said, "just showing her the aloha welcome."

"What's debauching?" Grace asked.

"Okay!" Danny said, "And it's time to edit some video!"

Kono snagged a handful of cookies and then followed Danny and Grace into the tiny bedroom that he’d designated his editing room, preferring to sleep on a fold out couch rather than risk any damage to his equipment. There was barely room in there for all three of them, so Kono had to look over his shoulder as he went through the footage, explaining things to him while Danny scribbled down notes. Grace was enthralled with the clips of Kono surfing, asked half a hundred questions that had Kono promising to give Grace lessons while Danny promised to rain down fire and retribution on Kono's head that would make a volcano look like nothing.

"Hey," Kono said, punching him lightly in the shoulder, just like she had that first time he’d seen her again on the beach. "I'll look out for her, it's all good. What are friends for?" Then she nodded at the screen, which for the last four minutes had been focused on Steve: paddling out and waiting for a wave, popping up onto the board and swooping back in to shore, arms spread wide as if he were flying. Her smile turned mischievous. "Speaking of—you and Steve are special friends, huh?"

"What?" Danny said. " _No_! What?" He hoped his voice didn't sound as high and panicky to Kono as it did to him; from the way she was rolling her eyes, he doubted it. He fought the urge to clap his hands over Gracie's ears, settled for saying, "We don't talk about the special in front of my _nine year old_ , okay?" through gritted teeth.

Kono shrugged and took another bite of her cookie. "Whatever. But seriously, I think the specialness would probably be obvious to the nine year old—you’ve got more footage of a _certain someone_ than of anyone else. Own it, brah. No point in getting all weird about it."

Which, of course, made Danny fidgety—he drummed his fingers against his leg for the rest of the time he spent reviewing the footage, tapped his foot on the ground while he took Grace and Kono out for dinner, squirmed around in his seat as he drove Grace back to Rachel's house. He sat for a long time in his car after Gracie had gone inside, long enough that Rachel texted him.

 _Daniel, you realise that if you make me ask if you're okay, you'll cede the moral high ground to me? Would be terrible blow to your ego_.

He turned his head, looked in through the tall iron gates and could see Rachel standing at her living room window. Her body language was tense—hands on hips, chin tilted upwards—which told him that she was worried, and screw it, having a conversation with Steve about whether he was participating in some sort of surfing-based industrial espionage had to be exponentially less awkward than having a conversation with his ex-wife about his big gay feelings for the aforesaid industrial espionage-committing surfer.

"What is my life," he said, and started his car with a sigh.

The drive over to Steve's place took long enough for him to get nervous, but not so long that he got nervous enough to back out. He parked, got out, walked through the grounds to where Steve’s apartment was located, giving himself a pep talk along the way. The pep talk voice in his head sounded uncomfortably like his Little League coach, but at this point, Danny would take all the encouragement he could get—even if it did come from a dyspeptic sixty-something who had a tendency to lapse into Yiddish when frustrated. Which was a lot.

"Man up, Williams," he told himself, and then almost tripped over one of his shoelaces which had come loose. He stooped down to redo it, rubbed a scuff mark off the toe of his Converse, and when he stood up again, he saw a tall figure leaving the accommodation block—Steve. But this was Steve dressed as Danny had never seen him before—long black cargo pants, black boots, a slim fitting long-sleeved black t-shirt with some kind of vest over it. Danny blinked, wondered if it was time for him to go and have his glasses' prescription rechecked, but when he opened his eyes once more, Steve was still dressed like he was auditioning for a bit part in some beat-em-up movie. "Aww hell," he murmured to himself, because there was no way he wasn't going to follow Steve and see where he was going, what he was up to—curiosity was totally his cardinal fucking sin, and when this was over, he owed some sort of mumbled half-apology to Rachel, to his Mom, to his seventh-grade teacher.

He watched Steve head for a shortcut to the beach, little more than a trail worn through a grove of trees that was much faster once you weren't carrying something bulky like a surfboard. Danny waited for a moment or two before following, straining to see where he was going through the failing evening light. It would be just his luck to trip and break his neck, probably on the roots of a pineapple tree or wherever the hell those things grew, and he was so busy peering down at his feet that he didn't notice the dark shape come barrelling out of the trees towards him until he was slammed into the trunk of a tree.

"What the hell?" Danny managed, words choked thanks to the forearm pressed against his windpipe.

Steve glared down at him for a moment, nostrils flaring, his free arm raised up over his head, and for a moment Danny gave serious consideration to breaking his streak and vomiting as a form of self-defence. But then Steve seemed to recognise Danny, and relaxed all at once, body language shifting so absolutely from Woods-Lurking Psychopath to Laid-Back Surfer that Danny could almost think he'd hallucinated what had come before. Almost. "Oh," Steve said. "Hey Danny."

"What the—what are you doing with your _hey, Danny_?" Danny snarled, poking Steve in the chest. "You Neanderthal freak, what is your—" He paused, squinting at what Steve was holding in one hand. "Is that a _rock_? Were you just about to hit me over the head with a _rock_? Oh my god, is that a _shoulder holster_? Are you dressed like a ninja because you actually think you are one?"

"Hey!" Steve said, looking affronted. "I should ask what you're doing, following me around in the dark on a Sunday night?"

"You think _me_ ”—Danny gestured at himself with both hands—“coming to see _you_ ”—he pointed at Steve—“is the weirdest thing going on here?" and oh yeah, he knew he might have been getting a bit shrill here, but he thought he had some cause. "You think _that's_ the big issue, Steven? _If that even is your name_." Steve flinched at that, but Danny held up a hand to stop him from saying anything more. "Oh no, my friend, oh no," he said, "you don't get to speak here," and he was winding himself up for a real shit fit, right there on a beach trail in the middle of the night when Steve stiffened, his head whipping around to look back in the direction they'd come from.

"Shh!" he said, and then he grabbed Danny by the wrist, tugging them both off the trail and into the dense undergrowth.

" _Wha_ —" The very relevant questions which Danny had were muffled by Steve clapping a hand over his mouth. He had no idea what the hell was going on; he hadn't heard a thing, and he was starting to feel like he'd made a huge error in making out with Steve, however briefly, let alone following him into the woods. Danny had always thought his Great-Uncle Jimmy was just an alcoholic creep, but was starting to reconsider his standpoint on Jimmy's mantra of "Never stick it in the crazy, kid." He was considering if he should try biting Steve's palm and making a break for it, wondering how far he'd make it through the woods with a nut with a handgun following him, but then he heard it, too—soft conversation, people moving toward them, the soft crack of twigs underfoot. Not that this reconciled Danny to being forcibly hushed, or made him really move Steve down his mental scale of _what the fuck_ any, but there was clearly something going on here.

The people neared, then moved past them without stopping. Danny caught a glimpse of them—one was a surfer, one whose name Danny could never remember, something eyewateringly preppy like Avery or Winslow or Vanderbilt; three burly guys he'd never seen before, who looked like they chewed on handfuls of steroids for breakfast; and Carlton Bass. As soon as they were out of earshot, Steve murmured into Danny's ear, "Get back to your car right now, go."

Danny tugged Steve's hand away from his mouth, turned to look at him with all the scepticism which he could muster—which, hey, he was from Jersey, that was a lot. "You've met me, right? You think there's a chance in hell I'm going to walk away from this… Okay, I admit I have no goddamn clue what’s going on, but I’m involved. _Steven_ ," he threw in for good measure.

Steve rolled his eyes. "For fuck's sake, Danny, my name _is_ —you know what, fine, come on."

When they reached the beach, Steve held up one hand and made some complicated gestures which Danny chose to interpret as _I'm going to hunker down behind these sand dunes and observe what's going on; I'd appreciate it if you'd do the same_. Bass and the others were standing down on the shoreline, looking out at the horizon. There were lights winking in the distance, as if one of the bigger cargo ships had decided to moor out there for the night. From a pocket in the vest he was wearing, Steve pulled out a pair of what had to be night vision binoculars, and for a moment, Danny thought he was monitoring the cargo ship. But then Danny realised there was something approaching, moving fast over the water through the growing darkness—a small boat with an outboard motor that was weirdly quiet and low slung. As the boat got closer, most of the group started wading out to meet it while Bass pulled out something large and held it up to his ear—a satellite phone, if Danny had to guess. The four out at the boat were retrieving stacks of packages, hauling them back to the beach and piling them up on the sand before heading back for more.

The urge to take off his glasses, scrub at his eyes and put his glasses back on was overwhelming, so Danny did just that. He'd known that Bass was a douche, but that he'd turned out to be—what, a property developer and surf team owner by day, drug smuggler by night? This was so far beyond anything Danny had ever imagined. Bass angled his head towards them a little, allowing Danny to make out some of what he was saying to the person on the other end of the phone call. Danny wasn't exactly what you could call gifted with languages, having scraped a D in high school Spanish and finished two semesters of college French able to say little more than _Voulez-vous coucher avec moi_? and _Où est la plume de ma tante_? but even he could tell that Bass was speaking some dialect of Chinese. No way could Danny distinguish whether it was Mandarin or Cantonese or what have you, but whatever Bass was saying, Steve could clearly follow it. His brow was furrowed as he listened, and then he said something that sounded like "Wo Fat" in a tone of quiet triumph. A name? Danny didn’t know.

"Stay here," Steve added, in a tone that sounded like he expected to be obeyed.

Danny had just enough time to respond—eloquently, he felt—with, "Uh…" before Steve was off and moving. He sprinted down the sand dunes, long legs eating up the distance rapidly, moving with focus and determination and holy shit, maybe Danny wasn't wrong—the guy really was a ninja. Steve was obviously outnumbered by Bass' goons, even before the guy manning the boat jumped into the fray, but he clearly didn't think of them as a serious threat. His movements as he dodged punches, countered a lucky blow with a roundhouse kick, were efficient and practiced and who was Danny kidding here, more than a little hot. He crouched there for a long moment, completely unable to make a decision as to what he should do—but then Bass was pulling a gun out of a pocket in his jacket. It was a tiny little thing, the kind of handgun clueless people bought when their desire to protect themselves was outweighed by the fact that the miniature model with the pearl inset in the handle just looked nicer, but Danny had no doubt that it could still do a lot of damage. Steve was distracted, duking it out with the biggest of the goons, saltwater swirling around his ankles and completely unaware that Bass was fumbling to put bullets into the gun. Bass looked inexperienced, had the panicked, desperate expression on his face of someone who'd never had to shoot another person before but was cornered enough to try it anyway, and he was going to shoot Steve.

Danny took a deep breath. He thought about Grace, about the fact that this was supposed to be the job that turned his life around for the better, about his Ma and his Pop and his brother and sisters, about the fact that _this was his life_ , and said, "Fuck it." He slithered his way down the sand dune, far less gracefully than Steve had managed, and tapped Bass on the shoulder just as he was lifting the gun to fire. Bass turned around, looking confused to see Danny there, and Danny hauled back and punched him out.

It was very satisfying. Danny was pretty sure he'd broken his knuckles.

The last goon went down, and Steve hauled him out of the surf to make sure that he didn't drown. He looked over at Danny and grinned, before pulling some honest-to-god zip ties out of his cargo pants. Soon six guys were cuffed and lying on the sand at Danny's feet. He stood over them, ready to apply a kick to the kidneys or what have you if one of them stirred before Steve got back from wading out to haul the dinghy ashore. Bass' gun was lying on the ground where he'd dropped it. Danny didn't know if he should pick it up or not, get it out of harm's way, but given that this was a crime scene, that was probably a bad idea. Danny settled for giving the weapon the side-eye instead.

Steve hauled the dinghy up onto the sand, biceps flexing under the dark material of his shirt. Then he pulled some kind of mini communicator thing from yet another pocket, all silvery and tiny like a prop from _Star Trek_ , and spoke into it in what was either military code or further proof that Danny was having an extended, very lucid psychotic break. Eventually Steve said, "Roger that," stuck the comm back into his pocket, turned to Danny and grinned and said, "Extraction team's ETA is 15 minutes. Good work there, Danno."

Danny pinched the bridge of his nose and worked very hard on using his vocabulary and not simply screaming inarticulately. "Uh huh. Okay. So, there are probably better ways to phrase this, but I don't think anyone is going to blame me for asking _what in the fucking hell_?"

Steve shuffled his feet a little, managed somehow to look sheepish despite being six foot plus of freaky ninja, covered in sand and drenched in salt water, a nasty looking bruise already turning his cheekbone purple. "I'm… not actually a pro surfer," he said, and shrugged. He _shrugged_ , and looked like that was the extent of the explanation he felt he had to give.

Danny took a breath, sucked on his upper lip for a moment, fought for the calm required to say, "You think _that's_ the thing I'm finding hard to believe about this? _Really_?"

"And my name is actually Steve—"

"McGarrett," Danny finished for him, then raised both his eyebrows, spread his arms wide, when Steve looked surprised at that. "What, I _investigate things for a living_. You think it's astounding that I might think huh, this guy, there's something going on here I don't know about? That"—he mimed typing on a computer keyboard—"that I might do a little digging, talk to some people, figure out some stuff?"

"This was a long term undercover op," Steve said, frowning, folding his arms. "Maintaining a cover story was necessary for—"

Danny waved a hand. "For being a stealth ninja, yeah, yeah, I got it. Not going to sign a release form because you don’t want to have film footage of you floating around online, yadda yadda. Doesn't mean I can't be cranky about it."

"Oh," Steve said. He looked a little nonplussed, as if nothing about this evening had gone the way he expected and he wasn't sure what was going to happen next. Danny stood there, ankle deep in sand and surrounded by unconscious criminals, and felt that he could empathise. "Uh."

Danny walked towards him, stopped so close in front of Steve that there was little room left for plausible deniability—but then, that probably hadn't been an option for them for a while now. "And I absolutely am thinking about being very cranky with you, you big idiot, what the hell was that with taking on five guys all by yourself? Recession so bad the government can't spring for a second guy? All those headers you took off surfboards, I'm going to guess they had some terrible effect on your brain cells." There was a chance that Danny was undermining the force of his admonishment by how he was very carefully tracing the outline of the big bruise on Steve's cheek with the tips of two fingers; by the way his own heart thumped and turned over at how his touch was enough to make Steve's eyes drift closed. "What am I going to do with you, huh?" he murmured.

"Danny," Steve said, opening his eyes, but before he could say or do anything else, they heard the rhythmic sound of a helicopter beating through the air toward them. "Uh," Steve said, looking off in the direction of the approaching chopper. "So this is SEAL Team 3 incoming, if we could just—"

"Yeah," Danny said, and took one step back, then another. "Sure, no problem."

***********

The next couple of hours were sort of a blur. The SEAL team landed, secured the prisoners and the cargo and moved them onto their helicopter. Danny got the distinct impression that whatever Bass was involved in, it was more than just your garden-variety drug smuggling; no one brought in the SEALs for drug smuggling, and no one handled a couple of pounds' worth of cocaine that gingerly. Out at sea, another helicopter was apparently moving toward the cargo ship, taking out whoever was there, and Danny had at least fifty questions just off the top of his head, but he'd been made to sign one hell of a non-disclosure agreement, so he didn't figure he'd ever get to ask them.

Within the space of thirty minutes, the whole beach had been cleaned out, like nothing had ever happened there: goons, gone; Bass, gone; weapons and packages, gone. Steve exchanged a few words with the guy that Danny was going to presume was the SEAL team leader, nodded sharply, and then hustled back to be out of the way of the updraft as the helicopter took off again. Danny shielded his eyes to stop the sand that was kicked up from blinding him; when he could look around again, it was just him and Steve on a quiet beach at an hour past midnight. "So," he said.

Steve jerked a thumb over his shoulder. "I have to go clear out my quarters," he said, chewing at his lower lip. "So."

"Okay," Danny said. "Well. I guess I'll see you around, then."

Steve headed back up through the woods to the accommodation block; Danny stood with his hands in his pockets, watching him leave, until the darkness swallowed Steve up and Danny finally trudged back up the main pathway toward the parking lot and his car and whatever came next.

***********

Danny spent most of the next week sitting in his apartment, not doing a whole hell of a lot. The headlines in the _Honolulu Star-Advertiser_ about the sudden, unexpected collapse of the world-famous Coral Prince surfing team, and the mysterious absence of co-owner Carlton Bass from the press conference which announced the same, sort of told him that there wasn't much point in working on editing together what footage he had. By Wednesday, the newspapers were full of quotes from disgruntled former Coral Prince employees who hadn't been paid amid rumours of "severe financial irregularities", and Danny sighed, made a pot of coffee, and started trawling through online job sites and the classified section of the newspaper. He didn't have much hope that there would be huge demand in Hawaii for someone whose skill sets mostly consisted of filming political exposés and getting surfers to perform crazy stunts on camera, but just maybe the local news channel might want a camera man, or he might carve out a little patch for himself filming baby showers.

He very pointedly tried not to think about Steve, who had no doubt packed up his stuff, put away the persona of Steve Smith entirely, and left the island for his next mission. Who had no doubt put away all thoughts of Danny, and there was no point in moping.

By Thursday, he was depressed enough about his employment opportunities that he decided to actually shower and shave and leave the house, get breakfast at that little diner a few blocks over. Stack of pancakes, the liberal application of maple syrup, several cups of coffee—maybe that was all he needed to make him feel like he'd slept properly in the past week or so. He was just unlocking his car when he heard someone call his name. Danny looked up to see Kono leaning out of the window of her own car.

"Hey, Danny," she said, smiling even though the expression wasn't really reflected in her eyes. There were lines of strain around her mouth that Danny couldn't remember seeing before, and Danny knew that Coral Prince had been like a second family to Kono, that she'd probably been out on a surfboard before she could walk. "Want to go get breakfast with me?"

"You buying?" Danny asked.

"Dutch only, brah."

"Eh, I'll take it," Danny said, striding over and getting into the passenger seat. "But I'm going to insist on having bacon, so none of that healthy eating cholesterol talk, you hear? Bacon is a necessity for quality kvetching."

Except it turned out that Kono didn't want to kvetch, or mope. Instead over breakfast, she sketched out a business plan for him, a trial run of the one she was going to pitch to a bank in a few days time. She'd been offered a place on half a dozen surfing teams once the news broke about Coral Prince, but they'd all require her to move somewhere else—California, Australia, South Africa—to live full-time. "Hawaii's my home," she continued, putting the finishing touches to the plan she'd drawn out for Danny on a paper napkin. "No way I'd be happy living somewhere else. Plus I think Hawaii needs a flagship team of its own. I've seen how Ian and… how the team was run, I know what works, I have a couple ideas how to make it better. I think I could make it work."

Danny took a sip of scalding-hot coffee. He hadn't asked how much Kono knew about what Bass had been up to, if she knew that Steve had been an undercover agent, or if she’d even realised yet just how thoroughly Steve Smith had vanished; couldn't really tell her what he knew either, given the forms he'd signed. "Sounds workable to me, babe," he said, "but I'm not exactly someone with a head for business, you might be better off talking to someone at a bank, you know? Someone who can give you advice for this sort of thing."

Kono shook her head. "Not asking your for your advice, Danny," she said, the smile that made her mouth curve upwards more heartfelt than any he'd seen from her that morning so far, "I want you to come on board. We're going to need to get our name out there, someone who knows how to do all that internet stuff, radio, all that. Someone who probably doesn’t mind wearing a suit to meet investors. I think Danny Williams, Managing Director, has a nice ring to it. And maybe," she said, smile turning a little mischievous, "we’ll even need someone to make a documentary of the team's first year?"

Danny scratched at a patch of stubble near the hinge of his jaw that he'd missed while shaving, leaned back in his chair and thought for a moment. He had no idea what the average success rate for a surf team was, what it was like to manage one; if he'd still end up back in his parents' basement in a year's time, subsisting on ramen and getting pity jobs from his parents' friends. Still, even if that turned out to be the case, it'd give him a year longer on Hawaii than he would have had otherwise; a year longer with his little girl. Kono had come to him, asked him for his help because she respected what he could do, and that was worth something too. "What the hell," he said, "count me in, boss."

They shook on it, and then talked over the plans a bit more before agreeing to meet up early the next week to hammer out the last few details before they brought the idea to a loan officer. "I'm going to talk to some more of the team this afternoon," Kono said as she dropped him on the sidewalk at his apartment. "A couple have already signed up with other teams, but I might be able to persuade the rest of them to hang around until we know what's what."

Danny walked back toward his building, feeling a little lighter now that he had some plan for the next few weeks. Sure, he didn't have any kind of _stability_ —he'd let himself get roped into jointly running a surfing start-up; a few days ago the guy he maybe-sort-of had some feelings for turned out to be an undercover Navy SEAL and maybe more than a little nuts; he was living a continent away from almost everyone he knew because he was bound and determined to follow his little girl wherever she went—but he had a plan to follow and that was a hell of a lot better than floundering. He was thinking of calling Rachel, maybe arranging to get Gracie this coming weekend instead of the one after if he was going to be caught up in planning this new thing with Kono—and then he rounded the corner and saw who was sitting on his building's stoop.

He stood and stared for a moment before he found his voice. "No bad guys needed taking out in Tajikistan, huh?"

Steve scrambled to his feet. It looked as if he'd been leaning against the door, half asleep. "Hey, Danny," he said. He wasn't dressed as Steve Smith anymore, so Danny supposed this was Steve McGarrett he was getting right now—blue polo shirt that looked like it had been sold in a Hanes’ four pack, pair of beige cargo pants, a scuffed pair of boots. Those tattoos that had been taunting Danny for so long now barely peeked out beneath the bottoms of his sleeves. He sounded tired; there were dark circles under his eyes.

"Well," Danny said after a pause that went on for way too long. "I suppose you'd better come in."

Steve followed him into the apartment, sat when Danny said, "Sit", looking outsized and awkward at the card table that did double duty as Danny’s kitchen table when it wasn’t serving as his desk. Danny made them both a coffee, then sat down opposite Steve and said, "Okay, spill."

Steve made a hilariously rubber face. "I can't reveal the details of an ongoing operation to a civilian, Danny—"

Danny flapped a hand. "I'm not asking about Bass, I could care less about Bass, so long as there's no danger of, like, whatever he was involved in blowing up the island where my daughter lives." Steve's face shifted into a suspiciously blank look, but there was no hint of either guilt or concern lurking behind it, so Danny was just going to let that one go. "I'm more concerned with, you know…" He gestured between them. "Stuff. Between us."

"Oh," Steve said. He rubbed at the nape of his neck. "I was hoping, you know. That there could still be stuff. If you wanted."

Danny squinted at him. "You're a Navy SEAL, Steve. Not exactly a profession that lets guys stick around in one place too much. Not exactly a profession that's keen on guys _with_ guys, come to that."

"They're repealing 654 soon," Steve said, setting his jaw. "And anyway, I'm going to be transferring to the Reserves. I'll be sticking around for a while."

There was a possibility Danny hadn't heard that right. "To the Reserves?"

Steve nodded. "There's going to be a lot of political fallout over what happened. Bass was just a bit player, but he was taking his orders from some very powerful people. Dangerous people."

"Would these people happen to be, say, members of the Chinese intelligence service?" The way Steve's eyes widened told Danny everything he needed to know. "Relax, don't burst something, I figured it out myself—makes sense, given that he was talking Chinese on the phone."

"Mandarin," Steve corrected automatically. He shifted in his seat. "I really can't speak about it any more."

Danny held up a hand. "It's okay, it's fine, I get it. But if things are getting so serious, why are you planning on getting out of the service, sticking around?"

"Looks like these guys are pretty entrenched on the islands," Steve said. "The Governor's offered me my own task force with full immunity and means, our only job will be to get these guys out of Hawaii. That’s what I was doing this week, getting it set up. You found out who I am, you probably figured out that Hawaii is my home. I want to help keep it safe. So, so I'll… be here." He cleared his throat, looked at the table, the floor, out the window, everywhere except at Danny—and Danny found that after everything, after all he'd been through, the only thing he felt when he looked at Steve was affection. The irritation, the confusion, the frustration—what the fuck ever to all of _that_.

"You big goof," he said, not even trying to keep the fondness out of his voice. "C'mere."

"What—" Steve managed to say, before Danny snagged him by the collar of his shirt and tugged him closer across the table. The angle was awkward, the edge of the table pressing into Danny's belly, but god, this kiss was more than enough to prove that while their first kiss on the beach had been good, Steve had been holding back. This time, Steve was right there with him—vocal and gasping, his big, callused hands coming up to cradle Danny's face, his lips hot and wet against Danny's. They fumbled to their feet, trying not to lose contact even as Steve moved around the table and pressed Danny up against the kitchen wall.

"Jesus," Danny said, "would you just," hearing how his own voice had gone hoarse and low, working his hands up underneath Steve's shirt. The skin of Steve's back was hot to the touch, the smooth planes of it marred here and there by ridges of scar tissue. Danny scraped his nails over them, over the tattoo on the small of Steve’s back that he’d been dying to lick for what seemed like an eternity; felt the hiss Steve let out in response as a rumble that reverberated through Danny’s own rib cage. They kissed again, and again, and Danny felt drugged on it, lit up from the inside out; couldn’t remember the last time he’d felt like his heart was about to beat its way out of his chest from sheer happiness. He smiled against Steve’s mouth, revelled in the way Steve had to struggle to open his eyes, long lashes fluttering against his cheeks.

“Look at you,” Danny murmured, pulling back a little, running one hand up Steve’s chest, up to cup his cheek. Steve’s stubble prickled pleasantly against Danny’s palm; it was a sensation he could get used to, maybe something he wanted to feel a couple of other places on his body. “Gorgeous, babe.”

Steve kissed him again, fiercely, then gritted out, “Come on, come on,” tugging Danny out of the little kitchen, kissing him all the while, only to stop and look bewildered when he realised that the two internal doors in the apartment led to first the bathroom, and second to Danny’s makeshift editing suite. "Where's the bedroom?"

Danny snickered, spread a hand wide, a la Vanna White, to indicate the sofa. "Has to be unpacked a little, but you're looking at it."

"And you _live_ here?" Steve said as Danny opened the sofa out to form the bed. The sheets were all kinds of rumpled, but they were clean; let it never be said that Danny Williams didn’t have some basic standards. "Seriously, Danny, this is—"

Steve, it turned out, was pretty easily distracted if you kissed this one point just behind his left ear. "Not what we should be talking about right now. In fact, my friend, I think there should be a lot less talking and a lot more naked, you understand?"

Shoes were kicked off, pants thrown away, shirts discarded, Steve cursed the fact that Danny wore an undershirt ( _do I look like a Philistine to you, Steven? No, I do not, thank you so much_ ) and then they were tumbling backwards onto the bed. The whole thing shuddered and groaned under their weight, springs squeaking when Danny ground down against Steve; Steve's eyes grew flatteringly dark for a moment before he said, "No really, this bed is terrible, we've got to get you a new place. Or you could, you know… I inherited my parents' place here, if you wanted to save on the rent, you could, you know…" For a guy who was more than six feet tall and sporting an impressive erection that was making Danny feel all sorts of happy, Steve definitely had a knack for appearing ten different kinds of bashful and awkward and uncertain. Danny was going to have to train him out of that.

"Really," Danny said, smirking, rubbing one thumb over and over against the cut of Steve's hipbone. Steve shivered in a way that had all sorts of pleasant reciprocal effects for Danny. He closed his eyes for a moment, rolling his hips into the sensation, before saying, "And what makes you think I'll be sticking around, huh?"

For just a split second, Steve looked like he'd been sucker punched, but then he caught sight of the grin on Danny's face; matched it with one of his own. "Got an idea," he said.

"Oh, an _idea_ , he says," Danny said, mock cranky, but he rolled with it when Steve pulled him down onto the mattress, put everything he had into kissing him back—and this was nothing he’d expected to find when he’d arrived in Hawaii, nothing he’d thought he could hope for, but hey. It was amazing what you could find when you learned to focus in on the right subject.


End file.
